A haunting collage of disaster and beauty, set to a shimmering track by Lights Out Asia, Johan Grimonprez in collaboration with acclaimed avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, based on an abstract from his latest book SATIN ISLAND.

Johan Grimonprez`s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, such as at the Hammer Museum (LA), the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich) and, the MOMA (NY). His works are part of the permanent collections of major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Kanazawa Art Museum (Japan) and Tate Modern (London).
His award winning films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009). Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale to Sundance, they
have garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. They have also been acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and FILM 4.
In 2011 Hatje Cantz Verlag published a reader on his work entitled "It`s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. His distributors are Soda Pictures and Kino Lorber International. His artwork is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) and the gallerie kamel mennour (Paris).
His current film project The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by author Andrew Feinstein, was awarded a development grant from the SUNDANCE INSTITUTE. His next film project How to Rewind your Dog is in development with the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the European MEDIA Programme.
Grimonprez divides his time between Brussels and New York, where he studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and where he now lectures
at the School of Visual Arts.

Reciting her own poetry, Jordanian-American poet Suheir Hammad’s voice carries the powerful force of dissent to find hope between the military parades and anti-aircraft guns. With what i will Johan Grimonprez provides glimpse of his upcoming feature documentary Shadow World based on Andrew Feinstein’s book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.

Johan Grimonprez`s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, such as at the Hammer Museum (LA), the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich) and, the MOMA (NY). His works are part of the permanent collections of major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Kanazawa Art Museum (Japan) and Tate Modern (London).
His award winning films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009). Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale to Sundance, they
have garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. They have also been acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and FILM 4.
In 2011 Hatje Cantz Verlag published a reader on his work entitled "It`s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. His distributors are Soda Pictures and Kino Lorber International. His artwork is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) and the gallerie kamel mennour (Paris).
His current film project The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by author Andrew Feinstein, was awarded a development grant from the SUNDANCE INSTITUTE. His next film project How to Rewind your Dog is in development with the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the European MEDIA Programme.
Grimonprez divides his time between Brussels and New York, where he studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and where he now lectures
at the School of Visual Arts.

In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it would be better for the Prince to be feared, than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, asks what it would mean to base a political system on love, rather than on fear.
How can we transform a society that is increasingly defined by a permanent state of war and cultivated by an industry of fear? How can we realize the paradigm shift necessary to move away from a reality that depends on the exploitation of people and the cult of privatising public resources? Hardt looks for an answer in what he calls `the commons’, by which he refers not only to natural resources, but also to the languages we create- and the relationships we conceive together.
In the dystopian city-state Alphaville, of Godard`s eponymous film, all words and concepts relating to the idea of love and affection have been banned. When actress Anna Karina tries to express her feelings, she has to reinvent the words, for the concept of love is foreign to her. Like the protagonist in Alphaville, Hardt suggests that we need to redefine the tools to act politically together. Hardt embarks on a journey to identify the transformative powers of the ongoing struggle to re-invent democracy. Within this struggle he understands `the commons` as an antidote against a society run by fear; an inspiration for a paradigm that is based on dialogue and cooperation.

Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of theviewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of histories and realties.

In this short film by Johan Grimonprez, philosopher/neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.

Johan Grimonprez transposes an extract from Meg Stuart`s compelling choreography ?No Longer Ready-Made? to the anonymous waiting room of a railway station. This colourless space along with nameless travellers provides the excellent setting for Stuart`s hectic and intense convulsions. A train ride along the nightly Brussels northern area supports the vitriolic New York City prose of David Wojnarowicz on the soundtrack.

Johan Grimonprez (°1962) studied photography and Mixed Media at the Academie in Ghent, after which he spent several years in New York at the School of Visual Arts through the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and he obtained his postgraduate degree from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He lives and works both in Ghent and New York, where he is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts. Grimonprez is best-known for his video work DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which became an international success after screenings at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and during Documenta X in Kassel (1997), transcending the established delineations between visual arts, cinema and television, between fiction, documentary and ?art video?. In this and other work Grimonprez mainly investigates the use of mass media as a political instrument and the construction of realities in an era of infotainment and media saturation. `Zaptitude` is the central idea ? the surreal poetry of `channel hopping`, which enables the spectator to write his/her own story. His work has been shown and awarded, among other places, at the San Francisco Film Festival and Images Toronto, on ARTE TV (Germany/France) and Channel 4 (VK), in the Whitney Museum (New York) and Tate Modern (London).

A car with a big sound system broadcasts a text of Eduardo Affonso Reidy on his modern architecture precepts. It drives around the Conjunto Habitacional Pedregulho, a social housing complex build from 1946 by the same architect and also called Minhocão (the big worm) by his inhabitants. The ballet of the driving car, combined with interviews, sound extracts from the fiction film « Lucio Flávio, the passenger of agony » (shot partly in the site) and other scenes, produce a portrait of a major modernist Brazilian building and of the popular northern zone´s context of Rio de Janeiro. The film raises issues about patrimony and memory of social housings in a place which is about to be renovated after 50 years of state´s abandonment and autonomous management.

A car with a big sound system broadcasts a text of Eduardo Affonso Reidy on his modern architecture precepts. It drives around the Conjunto Habitacional Pedregulho, a social housing complex build from 1946 by the same architect and also called Minhocão (the big worm) by his inhabitants. The ballet of the driving car, combined with interviews, sound extracts from the fiction film « Lucio Flávio, the passenger of agony » (shot partly in the site) and other scenes, produce a portrait of a major modernist Brazilian building and of the popular northern zone´s context of Rio de Janeiro. The film raises issues about patrimony and memory of social housings in a place which is about to be renovated after 50 years of state´s abandonment and autonomous management.

What happens when a family revisit a house they abandoned sixteen years ago? It wasnâ€™t a
decision where Saira & Salim had a choice. Would you be able to relive those delightful memories
& conversations without the traumatic ones overpowering your emotions?

Eshwarya is a post graduate film student at National Institute of Design, India. She has studied
architecture and believes that film is all about capturing the emotion of a space or creating a
subconscious space and how people interact with it.

Katharina Gruzei combines a sociopolitical issue and a precise formal concept, which is rare in experimental film. Inspired by the Lumière brothers? first film, La sortie de l?usine Lumière à Lyon, which shows a large number of workers leaving their factory?s gate, Gruzei begins in the interior, in a passageway (made to seem incredibly long by the editing) that emerges from the darkness.
More and more of them walk down the dark, flickering hallway. By these scenes the weirdness of the space and the menacing quality of a mass of people who could form a resistance movement becomes increasingly evident. All relevant questions concerning the on-the-job reality experienced by these workers, most of whom are women, can be formulated by means of association: Is it nighttime when they leave the factory? What kind of work do they have to do? What do female laborers earn these days? How long does it take them to get home from this monstrous factory, and when will it be moved to a low-wage country?

born 1983
Studies of Experimental Art and Cultural Studies at the University of the Arts in Linz, Austria.
Studies abroad at the Art Department of the Universtiy of California Santa Barbara and at the University of Fine Arts Berlin for Visual Cultural Studies in the class of Katharina Sieverding.
Katharina Gruzei works with photography, film, video, installations, media-performances, sound and objects. Working conceptually, she experiments between these disciplines and arrives at an unique crossover language.

The filmmaker and artist Romeo Grünfelder (* 1968) MA in Music, Philosophy, Media and Visual Communication. He was a fellow of Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades and in 2008 he received a art grant from the city of Hamburg. He teaches drama and philosophy at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He lives and works in Hamburg.
Grünfelder?s work was shown in exhibition context and at international film and media festivals. His awarded shortfilms are experimental documentaries in the broadest sense, oscillating between documentary and fine art. His main focus is on paranormal topics. Grünfelder?s work is represented by the Short Film Agency Hamburg, the Berlin gallery Kunstagenten as well as by the gallery Ruzicska-Weiss, Dusseldorf.

Language Lesson (2016) intercuts two tracking shots -- a shaky handheld approach to the Yugoslav dictator’s mausoleum, with a smooth following shot of my Yugoslav mother walking through her Canadian apartment corridor, and entering the small living quarters in which she will almost certainly pass the remainder of her days. If she’s not exactly an exile, she’s certainly cut off from her past, her friends, the sites where she grew up and feels most familiar, or so we may imagine just upon hearing her accent, which comes in the form of voiceover, where she gives us a little lesson in speaking Serbian. She says things like, “This is here, this is mine, this is shit, I don’t like this…”, alternating in English, then Serbian (subtitled in French). The thoughts expressed range from neutral, to (perhaps) happy, to disappointed or displeased. As she walks, her thoughts seem to change. Similarly, a change happens on the approach to the mausoleum, which at first appears lavish, in sparkling marble. We don’t know at first where we are, other than in a cemetery, the burial site of someone very esteemed, wealthy, important. After short bursts of the approach, we eventually see the name of Tito, which perhaps causes us to reflect on opulence in a land where there was seldom plenty. The camera drops quickly to the ground, where we apprehend a struggle between a colony of ants, which crawl in and out of the cracks in the marble base of the crypt, each fighting for the corpse of a fly. Notions of sacrifice and fellowship in the common pursuit of attaining a progressive, egalitarian social order, rapidly give way to an each-for-their-own, eat-or-be-eaten state of affairs.

In Vesna At the Monument (2016), a humble middle aged woman appears on the site of a dilapidated, in-the-middle-of-nowhere monument, erected likely in the time when she was youthful and at her most optimistic. The monument was commissioned in order to commemorate the heroic actions of common citizens in their struggle against fascism, and desire to promote and participate in a progressive, utopic state. She shuffles past the monument, and sits to smoke a cigarette. Off screen, a voice is heard, asking her questions such as what is the meaning of this place, this monument, this moment. She does not answer, as though she does not hear the question, even while acknowledging the camera, and the voice itself. It could, one supposes, be the voice of the cameraman or director, a voice in the subject’s own head, perhaps the voice of the monument itself, trying to ascertain the meaning of itself in this day and age. It gets no reply, and eventually (perhaps fed up with the question), she simply leaves, with the interlocutor left in his own uncertainty. The video seems to reject or deny a past, while expressing grave uncertainty to the future.

The Guajira is a borderland peninsula between Colombia and Venezuela of resolute natives as well as disinherited adventurers. Some there take advantage of the peripheral territory to smuggle through isolated ports and over rugged landscape. They write their rebellious proclamation in the sands of crisscrossing desert paths and their rusted motors accompany their solitary voices with an unorthodox music, animating their indiscipline and adhesion to pure movement.

Chris Gude (1985, New York) studied geography and anthropology at Middlebury College. His first film, MAMBO COOL (2013), exhibited at FIDMarseille, Viennale, Punto de Vista, Mar del Plata, Cartagena, among others. His second film, MARIANA (2017), also premiered at FIDMarseille and won Best Director at the Ourense International Film Festival.

The images of a virgin Argentina, out from a private photographic archive, become present landscape: the river, the forest, the road: everything seems unchanged... except a ruined cotton factory, ghost of the collapse of a model of development imported from Europe, which is now a few teenager`s playground.

Caterina Gueli an italo-argentinean director/editor based in Paris.
?La Fabril? is a work in progress, through which she deepens the research engaged in her precedent two short films : Resistencia (Premio Avanti! Torino Film Festival 2007, Best Soundtrack Genova Film Festival 2008, etc.) and Somewhere (2009). She has participated to the realization of Il Canto dei Nuovi Emigranti (Best Documentary Torino Film Festival 2005) and In Attesa dell`Avvento (Best Short Film - Mostra del Cinema di Venezia 2011 ? Orizzonti) of Felice D`Agostino and Arturo Lavorato.

Landscape: My feet at night, the sea on my feet (2012)
This work was born as a late work from the project ?Between Iloca and Dichato? which tried to capture, by means of a trip, the marginal and unmediated consequences of the Chilean Tsunami, one year later.
The space reveals the weight of time, where in the year since the Tsunami things haven´t changed radically. Compared with ?Man?, this video focuses on the landscape using steady and long shots as a strategy to capture those ?after? spaces. The silence of the field, contrasted with the government speech; the Sea goes up and down, the man is just a viewer, or another piece from the picture.

Rafael Guendelman, was born in Santiago of Chile, in 1987. Bachelor in Visual Arts and degree on Theory of Cinema from Catholic University, Chile. In the same University has been Teacher Assistant in the Video Art and Workshop classes for several years. Rafael works as a visual artist and video maker. He has participated in group exhibits and video screenings in Chile, the USA, France, Israel, Palestinian territories and others. This year he has been living in/between Middle East and Europe, filming in the Palestinian territories and Israel, and participating in the international residency program of ZK/U, the ?Center for arts and Urbanistics? in Berlin.

Man: Sometimes in the night I lose my mind (2011)
This work was part of the project ?Between Iloca and Dichato.? It tried to capture, by means of a trip, the marginal and unmediated consequences of the Chilean Tsunami, one year later.
It´s a choral story of the experience from interviews with people who witnessed the wave. The video shows ideas, abstractions and derivations of what happened that night, putting the emphasis on the paradoxical perception of the people; between humor and tragedy. A fragmented narrative emerges naturally from the memory pieces of the people.

Rafael Guendelman, was born in Santiago of Chile, in 1987. Bachelor in Visual Arts and degree on Theory of Cinema from Catholic University, Chile. In the same University has been Teacher Assistant in the Video Art and Workshop classes for several years. Rafael works as a visual artist and video maker. He has participated in group exhibits and video screenings in Chile, the USA, France, Israel, Palestinian territories and others. This year he has been living in/between Middle East and Europe, filming in the Palestinian territories and Israel, and participating in the international residency program of ZK/U, The ?Center for arts and Urbanistics? in Berlin.

Through the means of a still fixed camera and the rhythmic strengtht granted by on-camera editing; Corta is a film centered upon the hypnotic extenuation generated by the body movements of sugar cane cutters. A contemplation of the frenziness and softness of the performatic gestures of hand labour while the surrounding plantations act as an omnipresent backdrop as the canes disappear. Corta is a pure cinematic experience about the natural and everyday ritual of a timeless world.

Felipe Guerrero holds a degree in Film Editing from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in Rome, Italy. As an editor he has worked in internationally exhibited and award-winning films. In 2006 he made his directing debut with the documentary Paraíso, which was awarded at FID Marseille. Corta is his second film. He lives in Buenos Aires.